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Artist
Robert Lucas
12+ albums
bluesharmonica bluesbluesrockslide guitaraccoustic blues
about
Blues musician best known for his work with Canned Heat. The blues singer, guitarist and harmonica player Robert Lucas, who has died aged 46, apparently from a drug overdose, spent the last five years of the last century as the front man of the seemingly everlasting blues band Canned Heat. Lucas grew up in Long Beach, California, where he began playing harmonica at the age of 13 and slide guitar three years later. He also worked in a band led by the guitarist Bernie Pearl. By the late 1980s, he was being hailed in the blues press as "by far one of the brightest new blues talents on the road today ... he gives knockout performances in both solo acoustic country blues style and the electric Chicago style band blues." At various times he shared a stage with such eminences grises of the blues as Big Joe Turner, Lowell Fulson, Pee Wee Crayton, Percy Mayfield and Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson. His first album, the mostly solo Across the River (1989), proved to be a fairly accurate template for several that followed it, in its mixture of original songs and blues by Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters and Fred McDowell, sources to which he would return on Usin' Man Blues (1990), Built for Comfort (1992) and the more elaborately produced Layaway (1994). Working with a band under the billing Luke and the Locomotives, he recorded an eponymous album in 1991 that earned an approving comment from the veteran bluesman Robert Lockwood, Jr: "This record has that old sound, that old Chicago sound." Th
